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Stanley Kubrick and James Harris acquired the right to Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, a novel considered unfilmable, several years after it was first published in September 1955 in Paris by Maurice Girodias' Olympia Press, which specialized in pornographic literature.
Jun 6, 2015 · In 1955, Vladimir Nabokov wrote about a predatory middle-aged literature professor who succumbs to his desires for the flesh and fancy of a 12-year-old girl he nicknames Lolita.
- Overview
- Production notes and credits
- Cast
Lolita, American dark comedy film, released in 1962, that was Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel of the same name.
(Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)
Britannica Quiz
Classic Closing Lines
In the film, eccentric middle-aged Humbert Humbert (played by James Mason) is driven to ruin because of his obsession with a sultry teenage girl, Lolita (Sue Lyon). His passion for her leads him to marry her lonely, sex-starved mother (Shelley Winters). Peter Sellers portrayed a pedophile whose competition with Humbert leads to disaster.
Kubrick hired Nabokov to author the screenplay but ended up rewriting most of it himself, though he allowed Nabokov to keep the screen credit (which earned him an Academy Award nomination). Moreover, censorship restrictions mandated that Kubrick raise the age of the title character from 12 to about 15 years old and feature nothing more overtly sexual than a pedicure in this “forbidden” relationship. Mason was highly praised for his performance as the uptight professor, and Winters also received great acclaim. The film was remade in 1997 with Jeremy Irons and Dominique Swain.
•Studio: MGM
•Director: Stanley Kubrick
•Writer: Vladimir Nabokov
•Music: Nelson Riddle
•James Mason (Humbert Humbert)
•Shelley Winters (Charlotte Haze)
•Sue Lyon (Lolita)
•Peter Sellers (Clare Quilty)
•Diana Decker (Jean Farlow)
•Jerry Stovin (John Farlow)
- Lee Pfeiffer
Lolita: Directed by Stanley Kubrick. With James Mason, Shelley Winters, Sue Lyon, Gary Cockrell. A middle-aged college professor becomes infatuated with a 14-year-old girl.
- (110K)
- Crime, Drama, Romance
- Stanley Kubrick
- 1962-06-21
On the infamous poster for Stanley Kubrick's adaptation, a 1962 "black slapstick" comedy, as critic Pauline Kael called it, a young girl peeks at us over a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses,...
- Steph Green
Nov 13, 2009 · Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s famously controversial novel Lolita has its New York premiere on June 13, 1962. Even its advertising posters pose the question: “How...
Nov 5, 2000 · Unwilling to dwell on the novel’s sexual content, Kubrick turned the first part of Lolita into a social satire (undoubtedly in the book), devoting the early section of the film to Charlotte Haze’s comic marriage to Humbert Humbert.
